I have seen only a few(four, I think)of the nominated movies and I am unlikely to get around to all(or any?)of the others. We’ll see. So here is where I stand so far. My choice for the award, based upon what I’ve seen, is undoubtedly “American Fiction.” ”Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Oppenheimer” have both gotten a lot more attention. Understandably–they are “big movies” with many well know big stars(to the extent that anyone is still a big movie star) and high production values, and both reek of money spent.

Both of these two are, I wish to state, very, very good films and I am not denigrating them. But next to “Fiction” they both seem a bit bloated, a bit overdone. And “Fiction,” which must have cost a great deal less, is so unpretentious and so on the mark in its humor/pathos, that it is easily my choice. Based upon a novel of a decade and a half ago, “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, director-screenwriter Cord Jefferson(with Everett) may have created not only a moving, entertaining, intelligent movie, but a statement of dissent for this time in America, dissent at least from the talk of the leftist literati, black and white, of the last 20 years or so.

Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a gifted black writer who is a successful college literature teacher. He is also a gifted writer who has published several books and gotten critical praise, but little in sales or public attention. He is dissatisfied with his lot, but he disdains the facile exploitation of black people by “artists” whose portrait seems to say they all live in ghettos and talk in jive. His mood is not improved when a new book is rejected by a publisher with the suggestion he write what might be described as “more black,” and his university employer gives him a temporary leave with the suggestion he explore his own culture further, more or less that he get in touch with himself

After a confrontation with black female writer Sintara Golden and others at a writer’s conference. he decides to take on his critics by writing a book that is so bad in its pandering to black extremists and white radical phonies that it will call attention to his point of view and amuse its readers. On the contrary, he is surprised (to put it quite mildly)when no one seems to “get it.” It is taken seriously to the extent that a publisher offers him three quarters of a million dollars as an advance.

Stunned and slightly cynical now, he offers to have it published if he can change the title name to F+++(I’m waiting for Trump to say the word in public–if he does I might consent to writing it). He doesn’t really expect this idea to go far, but, again to his surprise, they agree and the book is so published. But instead of his real name he agrees(after  pressure from his agent)to use the name Stagg R Leigh, who the publisher announces(for public consumption) is a wanted convict and therefore will not make public appearances.  It sells well and the left-leaning critics black and white(mostly white) fawn over it. In fact, it wins a literary award, from a writers’ panel which includes a somewhat reluctant Thelonius, and his sometime nemesis, Sintara Surprisingly they get along well.

At the awards ceremony, Theo decides to attend and reveal all. What happens then I leave to you to learn by viewing.

Now, a couple of comments on things left out, by me or others.–the rest of the cast includes Leslie Uggams as Theo’s mother. I remember her as a little girl on an old, old musical game show on TV(“Name That Tune?”)many years ago. Otherwise, the rest of the cast is largely unknown to me. Issa Rae is very good as the author who writes the kind of trash our hero hates, yet still seems to have some character of her own. Sterling K Brown is effective as Cliff, Theo’s brilliant and accomplished but depressed and searching brother. Erika Alexander is Coraline, Theo’s love interest and does a more than credible job of portraying a sensitive woman who knows she’s got a good man on her hands, but one it’s hard to know how to handle. There is not a poor or routine performance among them.

The hero’s nickname, “Monk,” will be known to many of you, and for the benefit of all who don’t know, Thelonious Monk was a mid-20th century jazz musician, one of the giants of that time who shared the jazz limelight with Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and other jazz icons. He was quoted as having said “A’int no bad sounds that come out of a piano”–or words to that effect anyway,

More sneaky and obscure is Theo’s choice, with some help, of the pseudonym of Stagg R Leigh. As far as I recall no mention is made in the film of the source of this name. Actually, “Stagger Lee” is an old American black blues song dating back at least a century, maybe more. It is supposed to be based on a true incident in 1895 St Louis is which a gambler named Stagger Lee shot Billy Lyons who grabbed Stagger Lee’s hat. It has been recorded more than 60 times by a variety of singers ranging from James Brown to Nick Cave to Neil Diamond. In the 1950’s Lloyd Price had a hit record with it. Nonetheless, I would wager, that most white Americans and maybe most blacks too could not today tell you who Stagger Lee was. In any event, I hope you will see this remarkably good film and cross your fingers for it to win. It would be a victory for restraint, good art and real tolerance for it to finish at the top.

Nothing similar could be said–not by me, at least–about “Poor Things.” If this Thing wins the Oscar it will be a travesty on taste and possibly on the direction of Western civilization. Now I realize I’m somewhat running against the wind here. This film has been widely and highly praised by critics and apparently has made a fair amount of money so far. It is nominated for a number of big awards by BAFTA and also by the by the Acaemy Awards people. It has already won big in some places–Golden Globes for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy and Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. What? Musical or Comedy? Thinking of Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Lowe? Wrong thought, friends–no resemblance there. Nor with any other musical comedy team you can think of. Nor with any comedy writer I can think of. Go ask Mel Brooks–or the ghosts of Kauffman and Hart–or Aristophanes.

This is not a comedy in any sense I can discern. Music does play a role at one point, a scene I shall describe shortly–one of the few good things in the movie, or stick with me. But it’s by no stretch of the mind a musical. So I guess the award was for Comedy, but I laughed only at the negative side of the film. It was sort of funny that people thought it was funny. But I didn’t do that until after the film had ended.

It’s not as if the film has no merits at all. It’s well done in a technical sense. The photography and art direction are superb. This moving shots of various cities are impressive if sometimes bizrre And speaking of bizarre–

Well, a lot of critics have noted that the obvious influence and source here is “Frankenstein.” It’s actually based on a novel by Alasdair Gray which was published in 1992.. But “Frankenstein” is the guide. Bella Baxter(Emma Stone)is a young woman in what turns out to be Victorian London, although I wasn’t sure for awhile. It was 19th century, I thought, but where? Somewhere in Europe?(Yes)The other side of the moon?(No, but not an unreasonable guess). Anyway the “comedy” begins with her suicide by jumping off a bridge. She is brought back to life by the Franeknstein stand-in Dr Godwin Baxter(William Dafoe). 

Dafoe’s character is not a normal human being. His appearance is that of a man who has been trampled by several herds of animals and then attacked by a knife-wielding maniac. This is put down in a very brief description of what would now be child-abuse writ large, but never mind.. In addition to this he is-uh, odd, perhaps entirely due to the abuse, perhaps not. But he’s also brilliant and ambitious to do new and great things.  So he puts the brain of the young woman’s unborn fetus into the woman. She comes back to life and is now a grown woman with a child’s brain. She is also her own mother–or her own daughter? Well, never mind, it doesn’t matter

It is a sort of fascinating thing(about the only one in the whole film)watching Bella’s mind catch up with her body. There is no explanation for this, but it appears to happen rather swiftly–not right away, but months rather than years.

Soon, as she climbs toward full maturity, she accepts the blandishments of a creepy and degenerate lawyer(Mark Ruffalo) They go on a journey which takes them to several important European cities, rather like the centuries old “Grand tour” for young aristocratic men. But this tour seeks not knowledge of the past and of other countries, it seeks the bizaree and(unfortunately a lot of viewers will doubtless say)finds it. They dash from Athens to Paris with a number of other stops in between where they experience sex with so many people that I lost count, not that I cared much by then. The sex is, well, strenuous in many cases and  more on this later. 

Now at about this point I thought the movie just might redeem itself to some degree, anyway. It might be like “Afire,” (see my blog of Sep 6), which turned around from being a real drag and turned into a good film during about its last third. Bella is now at the point of just about full mental maturity and she has used it well. She starts to wonder about the world–what’s going on out there? What’s the meaning of it all? Why is there injustice? She even reads Ralph Waldo Emerson and apparently appreciates his writing(My guess would be that Ralph Waldo would not have appreciated being with her on this trip). 

Anyway her attitudes and her conversation change. She become rational, perhaps even empathetic. There is the start of a metamorphosis here, one thinks. One is wrong–never happens. More specifically, there is one scene in Portugal which for a brief time I thought truly beautiful. The location of the scene was not clear to me. Maybe a concert hall, but the dancing couples seem to make that unlikely. Maybe a 19th century Lisbon version of a nightclub. Who knows? Nor does it matter. There are a lot of people together listening to what I thought some very beautiful music which I think could be roughly described as classical. Some of them are dancing, however, not something one usually does with Bach or Beethoven. The combination of the beautiful clothes and the gorgeous music is stunning, particularly when a woman accompaning herself on a stringed instrument of some sort begins to sing.

Although I’m not sure, I think she was doing a song from the Portuguese musical traditon known as “Fado.” Around for more than a century and a half now, Fado usually features a woman singing, accompanying herself. She sings a sad song about lost love, broken hearts, etc. Of course that’s the basis a lot of music world-wide, but Fado concentrates on this. As I said, I am not familiar enough with it to be sure, but I think that lady was perhaps singing Fado. Whatever, it was it was beautiful. I looked forward to hearing the whole song. It ran maybe 90 seconds. Oh, well. After that, it’s back to London and I don’t think I’ll go further than that(Hey, London’s almost always a good place to stay)

Now there are a few anomalies to explore. As you have no doubt discerned I dislike the film a great deal. There are two main reasons for it and they both have to do with excess and some other things. The two things that get to me are the ways in which it handles the physically visible aspects of a number of medical matters and the grossly inadequate job it does in portraying sex. These two would have been enough to ruin it for me even I hadn’t found the plot to be over-the-top ridiculous.

Dr Godwin is apparently a mentally perverted genius. He is not necessarily cruel in that thinks he’s doing good for mankind. But the film is loaded with close-ups of his work with the knife. Granted, they never let these scenes go on a very long time, but long enough you may become seriously disgusted or even sickened.  I have no idea how many times you see a knife entering flesh and blood spurting as a result. It’s a lot and it’s way off putting, at the leas,t way more than needed to make the point that this is serious stuff. I was astounded to see that approximately 80%(the figure seems to change day to day)of Rotten Tomatoes fans liked the movie. I have to wonder why they liked it and why more of them weren’t turned off, Perhaps the gross violation of the individual body no longer bothers people much? Does this account for the behavior of so much of the world in solving conflicts, the sort of thing we experience daily on the media?

Then there’s the sex. This is one of the most sexually explicit films I have ever seen. And it manages to get it wrong, at least in attitude. We see Bela with a large number of people in sexual situations. Technically speaking I guess you could say most of them appear to be “normal” sex. But that is only so from a physical point of view. While it is impossible to imagine sex without physicality, it is a mistake to ignore other aspects of it–like emotional reactions. And here I think the movie misses by a wide mark. Now maybe it does exactly what the director wanted it to do, but it clearly does not portray sex accurately from any normal point of view. It is an excellent example of why, in court, witnesses are sworn to tell the “whole truth.” It is possible to lie just by leaving some things out.

To repeat, the film’s sex scenes are mainly normal in their physical portrayal. But totally lacking is a sense of the emotion which ought to be involved. Sex is both a physical and an emotional matter, and while you won’t get anywhere without the former you won’t get too far without the latter. The film has no sense of this. There is, I think, a sense in which good sex is an altered state of consciousness,. This being th4e case, one needs to be careful about portraying it as only physical relations. You need to show the emotional part too. This could include portraying the occasional smile and caress, by showing tenderness and gentleness along with the passion. This can be done more or less “realistically” or it can be suggested by imaginative use of the art of filming.

I remember a film from long ago, the “hippie” era, called “The Trip,” starring Peter Fonda, among others. It wasn’t much of a film and belongs in no hall of fame, but there was one part I liked. Sex was portrayed as part of the trip and therefore not too explicit on the screen. Oh, you could tell what was going on but you were also affected by the music and the poetically indefinite feeling created by the hazy, “unrealistic” and vague photography. The fact that this was sex while high is hardly important. It was easy to see that sex IS a high and in that way is more than just physical reality. Attempts to portray it as only physical are therefore bound to fail. I think that’s why the sex in this film is always “frank,” but never erotic. It’s largely a distasteful bore. If anyone uses this film as a sex manual they are likely to end up very disappointed–to say the very least.

Possibly the director, Yorgos Lanthimos,” knew perfectly well what he was doing and got exactly the effect he was going for. This is not unfeasible, it’s even highly believable in what seems to be both the public mind and the consciousness of critics today. today. But to a certain type of mentality–mine included-it’s offensive.

So these two things along with the unbelievability of the twists and turns of the plot are my main objections(Lanthimos tried an old-fashioned twist of plot ending which is surprising but not very interesting.) There were a couple of other peculiarities about this movie that put me off. The Dafoe character is both very odd and highly talented in his field as is obvious from the beginning. It is not, perhaps surprising, then, that his property should be filled with odd animals–a goose with four legs like a dog, some kind of bird(I think)which appears to be literally only half there, etc. I suppose this is not very important, but why not tell us about it?

Likewise there appeared to be some kind of air travel going on in the 19th century European cities they visited, or at least in some of them. Huh? Did I get that right? Perhaps they’re accepted as just mysteries. I find them mere additional bizarreness which is hardly what this film needs. By the way, I did read a lot of other peoples’ comments, both critics and public and you may want to do the same if anything about “Poor Things” sounds even vaguely interesting to you.

Well, there you have it for now. Go, “American Fiction” and get lost, “Poor Things.” Yes, that’s kind of oversimplified-but so very expressive.